July 11, 2011, Featured Articles, Previews

Greg Miller: Magnificent Seven

Sun, Jul 10, 2011

Drawing on the cultural and geographic influences of his California roots, Greg Miller explores images of the American urban and rural landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The work grabs us nostalgically, rousing a hared cultural memory, but also teaches something of their lingering pull on contemporary perception.

Labeled a “neo-pop” and “post-pop” artist by such critics as Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank, Miller does indeed draw from the pop-cultural imagery that saturated American consciousness during the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was a time during which advertising and text became indelibly encrypted into our experience of everyday life. Life as “advertised” and life as “lived” were insuperably intertwined on the pages of “LIFE” and “LOOK” magazines, on television shows, commercials, billboards, hotel signs, romance novels and even matchbook covers as never before. Miller’s paintings excavate this imagery and often appear as unreconstructed fragments of these signs, drips, patterns and phrases. These form the layers of Miller’s pop cultural imagery, both literally and figuratively.

Greg Miller's work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation. The Get Go, a volume of his writings, photography and paintings, was published in 2010, and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Signs of the Nearly Actual, was published in 2008.

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